The media recently reported “new” research findings to the effect that rewards often backfire and self-esteem is not the wonderful, uplifting personal attribute once thought. As a result, schools are rethinking their teaching and classroom management philosophies.

Wrong again! Research showing that rewards often backfire and revealing the dark side of self-esteem has been available for quite some time. Furthermore, the Internet permits anyone who is interested to access this information. This supposedly “new” stuff simply illustrates the disconnect between research and practice in American education. More directly put, educational methodology is more driven by fad than fact. In effect, the classroom is in many ways a laboratory within which experiments are conducted using children as guinea pigs.

Full text of this article is available to subscribers only. Login if you are already a subscriber. If you are not a subscriber, you can subscribe to the online version here.

Shopping cart

Latest Videos

Related Articles

Most of us love waking up on Christmas morning to a few shiny packages filled with surprising holiday goodies. But, the madhouse that is the holiday shopping season proves that most people enjoy giving gifts as well (or at least do so anyway).

Yesterday, I watched one bully another one away from what he considers his private supply of sugar water. It won’t be many more weeks before it’s time to bring in the feeders because they’ll be gone.

Where did they go? The tiny little birds head for southern Mexico or northern Panama to spend the winter. It’s hard for me to get my mind around the fact that these little guys weighing only about three grams will head out at dusk one day and fly non-stop up to 500 miles over open water for 18 to 22 hours.

Many people will take a vacation during the summer. Nationally, a burglary occurs every 13 seconds. American homes are victims of burglary about every 15 seconds, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The typical burglarized homeowner suffers a loss of nearly $2,000 in stolen goods or property damage. I fear with the advances in electronics, and the increase in the number of televisions, sound systems, play stations and similar items, computers, iPads and cameras, this amount will steadily rise with the cyber evolution in our homes.

There are some officials, fortunately not here, who do not see the preventable and controllable plague in front of us. One might recall how the Pharaoh in Egypt was warned of plagues, yet he kept refusing to yield or bend or learn. Ignoring the horrific phenomenon of domestic violence is no different. This is an unpleasant topic perhaps, but so is death; so is disease; so is poverty; so is crime. Domestic violence incorporates elements of some or all of these “bad news” topics.